QorIQ quad cores reach into networks

POWERPC DEVELOPMENT continues apace at the house of Freescale, and while you won’t see any personal computers or mainstream server boxes running the Motorola Semiconductor spinoff’s designs, we’ll definitely be seeing its chips in QorIQ communications processors handling networking workloads.

Freescale launched its tidbit quad-core QorIQ P4040 (pronounced 'core eye-queue') processors today, aiming at low-power network and communications processing. The processor cores are actually e500mc cores built on a 45nm SOI process and packed in groups of four which make up the QorIQ P4040 itself.

QorIQ is Freescale’s current branding for its 32-bit processors, whilst the P4xxx series is targeted at communications and networking. Embedded, of course, these processors began sampling in octo-core versions (P4080) in late August. However the chipmaker has dialed-down power consumption with quad core models to meet the market’s demand for power-saving devices.

The P4040’s architecture breaks down like this - each of the four e500mc cores has a small-ish 128KB L2 cache and uses a CoreNet interconnect to communicate with 1MB each of backside and frontside L3 cache. The interconnect links to dual 64-bit DDR2/DDR3 memory controllers as well as encryption, dual 10Gbps Ethernet (XAUI), eight 1Gbps Ethernet controllers and even three PCIe 2.0 controllers.

Each core can run independently and can be turned off and on, reset and rebooted at will, which will give hardware developers plenty of options when it comes to power management. The thermal envelope for these P4040 chips, says Freescale, is less than 15W, which will enable building some serious passively-cooled networking appliances and devices around these chips.

Samples will start going out this quarter, and we’re told to expect devices built on this architecture from mid-2010. But don’t expect to see them on your desktop. µ